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Ch. 8: The School of Brown
(Return to Contents: Arheled) ' Chapter Eight ' ' The School of Brown ' Ronnie Wendy was cold. It seemed to be his perpetual condition these days, in the drafty old double room, where even with plastic and heavy curtains over the them the ancient many-paned windows still leaked a steady perceptible tide of cold. The fireplace provided a zone of relative warmth about ten feet away from it, but even seated right close to it Ronnie still had to wear thermals and three shirts with an old blanket wrapped around him. As the pipes would obviously freeze in such conditions, running water at Ronnie’s insistence had been shut off for the winter. When he needed water he drew it from the spigot by the back porch—usually a pitcherful for drinking lasted him a few days, and when he had to wash dishes he did it in a pot and threw the water out the door, but it was decidedly a primitive sort of existence. When the bitter cold came, and the mercury refused to climb above 6°, he found ice in his drinking water. Reluctantly he had used the space heater that night. When he went outside the next morning to fetch wood, to his vast amazement the thermometer read 15 below zero. He could not remember any winter, even the severe freeze of 1999, that low. The wood he had cut was rapidly diminishing. Cutting fresh wood was increasingly difficult also, as the blizzard a week ago had left the forest three feet under, and it seemed to be snowing every few days now. He bundled up, piled the fire high, and headed outside to excavate another fallen tree and get at least a few logs cut. He was floundering clumsily away, the deep snow making all his efforts more difficult, when he saw a man stumbling through the wood toward him. Ronnie stiffened and felt for his axe. He had never seen so wild and uncouth a figure, even in that terrible dream above the Silver Falls. A great cloak hung about him, tattered, stiff as a board with ice from dragging behind him. He was crusted in ice, jeans and coat and scarf, as if he had repeatedly fallen full-length in the snow. A rough beard and a wild mane of ice-frozen hair escaped from his fur cap. To his horror Ronnie saw that the man’s face was no longer red, but white, and blue patches hung about his nose, and from each nostril hung an icicle. “My god!” gasped Ronnie. The man stumbled on toward him. Dropping ax and saw Ronnie rushed over and caught him, steering him toward the house. “Come inside.” he said quickly, through his scarf. “You need to go to the hospital. I’ll call an ambulance.” “You will not.” the frozen man answered. “All I need is fire. Seat me by your fire, Ronmond, and I will be warm enough.” “You need medical attention.” insisted Ronnie as he jerked open the door and staggered inside, supporting the snowy stranger. “The Road be on this house.” said the man. Ronnie made to take off the frozen cloak, but the man’s leather-gloved hand clamped onto his. The man’s eyes, blue as his frostbitten nose, stared sternly into his. “None may divest me.” he said. “I will thaw swiftly enough. Ah, I see you have a full box. Allow me.” and he picked up the topmost log and rearranged it carefully on the half-consumed remains of the old log. It blazed up at once, and the white flames were edged with red and eerie blue. Heat billowed into the frigid rooms and even as Ronnie watched the ice and rime began to evaporate from the frozen stranger, till he steamed like a boiling pot. “You should sit down before you fall.” said Ronnie. “I’ll heat some water so we can at least bathe your frozen tissue until help comes.” “It is not right for you to be standing in your own house, Ronmond.” said the icy man. “I am thawing already. Tell me, have you learned what your name is?” “Well, I know Ronald means ‘counseller royal’, but my parents say they baptised me Ronnie. Have I met you before?” The stranger gave a harsh, sardonic chuckle. The ice was melting was from his hair and beard, leaving them long and wet and black upon his steaming coat. “you meet many people, Ronnie, and once you say farewell they cease to exist; they pass from your knowledge as utterly as if they had vanished, and become only memory. Fair memories of fair events, but only that, only phantoms. For in the end everything will be reduced to memory.” “But they exist.” said Ronnie. “I know that they continue elsewhere, their lives unfolding in their own way, separate from mine.” “Have you ever had the passing fear, the fearsome fancy that perhaps everything you see and experience comes into being only once during the moment you exist in, and afterwards ceases utterly when you experience it no more? Dreams are vivid as realities, and some dreams hang together as true as real life; perhaps you are dreaming now and do not know it.” “I remember waking up, and I remember everything I did today.” said Ronnie, disturbed beyond words. “And how many times have you dreamed of waking up and doing your mundane chores, and then woke up for real and realized you dreamed? And yet when you dream of waking up it was real to your mind; while you were in it you thought it was reality.” “When I am awake,” said Ronnie slowly, “I know I am awake…I feel it…things around me I know are real…” “But when you are dreaming, does not everything seem and feel true as well?” the stranger said softly. A dangerous, mocking smile played about his bearded lips. “Perhaps everything you experience is real only in the moment you perceive it. After all, when it comes right down to it, your conception of reality is mostly made of phantasms and assumptions based on the words of others.” “But if they stop being real, why do I meet people I have met before?” “And how many times have you entered a dream-frame that you know you dreamed before, even in your dream you know it. Perhaps you made up your mother, or conjured your sister; the lovely dirla like an exotic lily, with her perfect smiling face and her glossy darksome hair, that you see every week at youth group and yet know so little of, is she real? or is she a recurring phantom, an illusion wrought by you and no more real than your daydreams of her?” “I touch her when I shake hands, or when she hugs me.” said Ronnie. “I hear her voice. I do not make that up!” “Have you never felt that sorrow, the sorrow of seeing chance-meeting dissolve into memory and a fair face you beheld for a few hours pass into the shadows and join the hosts of other shadows, to transform into Memory, that oldest and greatest of the gods? She was real then, but how do you know she is real right now? Did she only exist while you spoke and smiled at her, and afterwards vanish?” “I saw her.” Ronnie said in a hard voice. “She is real. She was real then, and what is once real never ceases to be real.” The rough voice was filled with a measureless sadness. “They never return, they never return to the living; into the shadows following shadow they pass. Silent they stand in the land of forgetting, swallowed in past and consumed into phantoms.” “If they live, they go on. I meet some of them again. I know they are real.” “And how do you know what is real and what isn’t?” “The evidence of my senses and my soul.” The stranger’s face was turned away, but a dark smile lurked behind his voice. “So what you feel with your senses, is that what makes things real? Is reality limited to you? For all you know that may be so. How can you say there is even a horizon beyond what you can see? For you have only the word of others that other shores exist.” “If I got in a plane and travelled, I would see them.” “But you do not. You stay here, constrained by a thousand chains of duty and routine and finance. Are you the creator of your own chains? Perhaps you generated your reality as a writer generates a story; perhaps you move through formless chaos which your spirit shapes into realness as you pass, and your memory recreates what you have shaped before. How can you say different?” “Because there is scientific proof that other things exist! The scientists tell me that the moon and stars are real!” The stranger turned to face the fire, and Ronnie was surprised to notice that his matted dark hair was already dry. “The scientists tell you no such thing. The scientists tell you that everything is relative to whatever point you stand upon when measuring your knowledge. Have you never heard of the theory of relativity? That time is bound to space and shifts with it, and if you have gravity strong enough to bend the very light then time will bend as well? When they slow down light to cloak an event in their fiber-optic wires, they do not call it light-bending; they say that they have cloaked time itself. If you stand upon the sun and a traveller moving at light speed shines a ray at you, so different will be your time and his, the time he shines and the time you receive, that the past and future he and you experience will be relative to whoever’s view is looked upon; his past is not yours, and he will stay forever young while you grow old and die. For he moves at light speed, and one ages not at such speeds; neither does time pass when you move as fast as light. Reality is relative to whoever is observing it.” “Reality is real for everyone alike!” “If you stood upon a planet whose sun gave off green light, you would say all light is green, and you would be right in saying so, as far as your experience goes. If your senses are the measure of reality, does reality change if your senses cease to work? When a black hole absorbs all light, events stop at the point of no return; the event horizon we observe is the end of time itself, for no light comes out of it to reach us, and where there is no motion there is no reality, and the singularity beyond it is immune to laws of space. To a blind man light does not exist.” “But the blind man is wrong.” said Ronnie. “Light does exist.” “Because he is outvoted by others saying that it does?” “No.” said Ronnie. “It exists in itself, even if every being was unable to behold it.” “Relative, relative, everything is relative. Did the light speak to you and tell you it exists? All that you see is the horizon of your eyes; to you, that is all that exists; and if you travel, are you creating new scenery as you walk? What are you to say different? For there is no way to measure what is real, and what is real is different for every observer.” “Reality is that which exists and has being, independent of observers and my faulty perceptions.” “But if your perceptions are faulty, how are you to know reality exists? Perhaps everything you think is real is an elaborate illusion, a trick of self-deception, a walking dream incarnate. Perhaps others made it for you, manipulated light and brain, touch and taste to induce a virtual world and a fantasy reality. Perhaps nothing exists except yourself, and I am only a voice in the darkness echoing to you your own subconscious doubts.” Ronnie clenched his fist. A single stride carried him to the towering stranger. “Shall I convince you of your own existence?” he hissed. “Perhaps the feel of my fist will prove to you that you are real.” “And perhaps your illusion will induce in you the feel of connection and the force of delivery; you still would not know.” Ronnie turned to the fireplace and smote the masonry with his clenched fist. Pain shocked through his arm and hand, and there was blood on the rough stone. “I know…the wall…exists.” he gasped, cradling his hand. “In my dreams I never hurt, pain is dull, I feel little. For I do not desire my own discomfort, and only the force of conscious will and effort can make me do myself injury. I know the wall exists because it hurt me. My dreams cannot hurt me, for I generate them. Reality can hurt me, for it is outside me and has being apart from me.” His eyes blazed as he stared up into the dark dancing eyes before him. “And if the wall exists, so does everything else my senses tell me. My heart reads my senses, and I know the things I see cannot self-exist; someone made them, and that someone is not me, for I am not God! Even if outside powers manipulate my senses to induce a phantom world, they are outside of me and have existence besides myself, and if that is so, they must have a cause, for everything must have a cause except the First Cause of all, for He causes Himself. And there cannot be two First Causes, for if they differed, they could only differ by means of imperfection, and that which causes all good must itself be perfect. You have defeated yourself, dark stranger. There is no reason why the people I meet should not be real, nor any reason why I should not accept as testimony from them the things I do not know myself.” “What if what they say is not the truth?” Ronnie gave him a cold stare. The stranger’s face was white no longer, but red and healthy. “If what they say contradicts what I know to be real, it is not true. If the scientists tell me all things are relative, they are wrong. Reality has an abstract value independent of observation; being exists regardless of light speed.” The stranger had, without moving, somehow increased the distance between them. He laid his hand upon the door, and the look on his rough face was approving. “I hope you do not forget the things that you have said,” he answered. “You have answered me better than we hoped. Do not freeze to death, and upon the Temple Fell you yet may come to enter well.” He opened the door and strode out into the snow. “Who are you?” Ronnie shouted. “Who are you?” The stranger turned to look at him, and his smile was dark and wolvish, mocking and terrible. “I walk in the forest, and I stand amid the trees. I make my bed with the earth, and my dinner with the stones. Wind and fire, rain and ice are known to me. But I am never known, and no name do I bear.” Snow blew around him as a sudden sharp gust howled through the trees, concealing him and the wood behind him from view. Ronnie, shielding his face, backed inside and shut the door behind him. “Yes, do you need help with something?” the young and relatively pretty librarian said to Travel Lane as she stood hesitantly at the front desk. “Yeah, do we have, like, legends about the Wild Man of Winsted?” Travel said, feeling a little foolish. The voices of several teenagers bent over a map came to her faintly from the reading room. “That would be in our Genealogy Room, up the stairs here in front, then through the door and a couple rooms down. Verna should be there; she’s our local historian and she’ll be able to help you.” the librarian smiled. Travel found the room easily enough; it was the only door past the youth room that was open. It was a small and comfy room in one corner of the old brick building, with windows on two sides. Between the windows were bookshelves right up to the low ceiling, loaded with old books in brown or olive-green bindings. On the left as she stood in the door were floor cabinets and bookshelves above them with gaudy new books on historical subjects. A big heavy table occupied most of the room. The facing wall had a framed map that looked really antique, and under it a desk and computer were jammed against a corner of the room. In that corner sat a short dumpy woman with glasses and greyish-sandy hair nicely waved on top of her head, presumably Verna. She had a bird-like, agreeable face and wore a purple sweater. “Hi! Come right in.” said Verna in a soft bright voice, looking up. “Is there something you need help with?” That pretty much seems to be a librarian’s mantra, Travel thought wryly. “Yes, I’m looking for, um, info on the Wild Man of Winsted.” “Oh, the Wildman, yes, I have a folder right here with newspaper clippings, but you can look in Frank Demars’ 2nd volume of the Winsted annals; he has a chapter on the Witch of Winchester as well as on the Wildman.” “Thanks.” said Travel. Verna got up to rummage in her file cabinets for the folder, while Travel gazed at the big antique map of Winsted. It divided the town into two halves labeled East and West Winsted, and Highland Lake, when she looked for it, was strangely misshapen, with most of the coves gone, and was furthermore labeled only “Long Lake”. Verna found the folder, and as she gave it to Travel Travel asked her, “Why is Highland misnamed on that map?” “Oh, that map is from 1879. I don’t believe the lake was named Highland until somewhere around 1900; in fact, they were originally thinking of giving it some fantastic and quite ridiculous Indian name, when even the Indians only referred to it as the Big Pond.” She took Travel into a tiny alcove of a room in the far right-hand corner. This too was packed floor-to-ceiling with odd old books, and a stand in the middle held large padded folders of ancient maps. Verna pulled out a book with green hardcover binding labeled grandiosely “History of Winchester and Winsted, Vol. 2” and gave it to Travel. Going back to the big table Travel pulled out one of the old beize chairs and sat down. She found the articles in the folder said much the same as their compiled version in the Wildman chapter, and the full story turned out to be more or less as her grandmother had described it. In August of 1895 First Selectman Smith was blackberrying along the old Losaw Rd “under 2nd Cobble” when a wild manlike figure, entirely naked and his body covered with coarse black hair, leaped out of the bushes, gesticulating and uttering fearsome cries. Then it raced off, its’ mane of black hair streaming behind it. The narrator described Smith as a man not given to fancies or “to telling anything other than the strictest truth.” which seemed to bear out her grandmother’s analysis; especially when later on someone joked it was the Devil trying to scare Smith from spending so much of the town’s money. The next few accounts were of vanished chickens, dark shapes seen fleeing, a description of an actual photo (which of course had not been preserved) showing a mass of hair on the head but none on the body. Then came the most interesting account of all. “Edward Perkins…visiting his brother who lived on the hill above Bert Culver’s place…a man in ragged clothes standing by the barn, holding a tin pail.” Travel murmered. “Looking down on the Center, he asked ‘What place is that?” She noted this down, carefully. The librarian showed her an “atlas” of old maps, one page of which had Colebrook. Black boxes beside roads bore in neat slanted curling script the names of their owners. No Culver or Perkins appeared anywhere. “But the map is from 1875, so maybe they came later.” suggested Verna. “I would try the Colebrook land records—it does have it’s own town hall, doesn’t it?—and they might be able to help you.” A quick look at the computer downstairs confirmed that the Town Hall was open 1-5 in the winter. The three teenagers were gone and it was quiet in the reading room. A peculiar dark youngish man with neat black hair and a rumpled appearance, wearing a bright red shirt and brown pants, was seated at one of the tables, papers sprawled all over it, writing with an intent expression. There was a faint odor of wood smoke: did the library actually use its’ ancient fireplaces? Travel looked at the clock above the librarian’s front counter (the only clock among all the beautiful antique clocks everywhere else that actually worked) and saw it was just after three. Getting into her car Travel drove quickly to Colebrook Center. Buried in deep white snow, in the afternoon sun against the deep blue sky Colebrook looked beautiful. The town hall had been built inside the shell of an ancient grey house like an enormous barn. The inside had been completely rebuilt on the usual dull pattern that characterises municipal government buildings everywhere in New England. There must be some sort of code that mandates, punishable by fine, that hallways should be painted beige or off-cream and any grace or decoration be abolished. Built into the side of the hill sloping down from the Center on the north, just across from the General Store, it was far higher in the rear than on the street. A couple other huge rambling Colonial structures beside it were painted white, jumbled together. Travel parked in the rear lot and hurried inside. She hadn’t been into the place since its’ redoing, and everything, even the stonework of the rear foundation, was new. Inside the entry was a big open office on the left side, the doorway in an odd angle where a corridor met the entrance hall at a T. Travel went inside. Low white ceilings and overhead lights gave the wide office an incredibly bright look. The wide counter had fake green plants and a pile of varicolored candy, leftover Santas and lollipops mingling with peppermints, and a neat dish on the side held a mix of gaudy candy hearts and silver-wrapped chocolate kisses, reminding Travel that it was nearly Groundhog Day and it was only two weeks till Valentine’s Day, and she didn’t have a boyfriend. With her luck, she probably wouldn’t even have a date. Two old ladies were conferring over a computer screen, but one noticed her and headed to the counter. Not old, Travel emended; powdered and made-up, with gracefully waved brown-blonde hair obviously fresh from the saloon, she had to be in her late fifties. Maybe sixty. “Yes, can you tell me which office has the land records?” said Travel shyly. “You’re in luck; this office has them.” the woman said, motioning to a side room. “Is there something specific you need help with?” “Yeah, I’m trying to locate a guy who had a house on a hill above Burt Culver’s, with a view of the Center, around 1895.” said Travel. “Oh. Hmm. I think we sent off all the grand lists to the Assessor’s Office, didn’t we, Ma?” the woman called back. The older lady in blue replied yes and the other woman said to Travel, “Well, you’ll just have to look the long hard way, I guess. Do you know how to use the land records? No? They’re all in these racks, here,” preceeding Travel into the side room. “If you know the owner’s name your best bet would be to look for his name in the Grantor/Grantee index and see when he bought his house, or inherited it.” “What is a Grantor?” The woman flipped open an immense red binder on top of a cabinet in the middle of the room. It had tags of red leather running from A to Z sticking out of the pages in staircase fashion—two sets of A to Z. Inside were Xeroxes of old handwritten lists of names. “Grantor means the one selling or granting the property.” she explained. “Grantee is the person receiving it. Since you want to know where this Culver house is, what you do is find his name in the Grantee index and read the deed—hopefully it’ll give a description with some references that can actually be pinned down.” She pulled out a large heavy binder with three-foot laminated pages holding maps. One showed Colebrook, but cut into squares like a pizza or a brownie pan. Each square was labeled, sometimes illegibly, with a name. “This might help as well. Colonial land divisions were along vertical north-south ‘tiers’ cut up into ‘lots’, and as you can see they’re numbered. Neat on paper, but very annoying to farmers—this Josiah Phelps has lots all numbered 39, but miles apart, and the small landholders only got strips like these, irrespective of terrain. As you know these hills are mostly up and down. They usually ended up squatting where the land was good and staying there.” Travel thanked her and opened the Grantee index to C. The clerk’s crabbed handwriting was almost as hard to read as the old Lane ledger/journal, but she managed at last to find several entries under the name of Herbert Culver. The numbers in the columns after his name sent her in search of Book 18, page 439. The land records were kept in meta cabinets with niches furnished with rollers, so that one could slide the books easily in or out. The modern records being more voluminous, they were typewritten in small neat binders in a wardrobe-like cabinet on the right. But the older records were contained in enormous old books with great brown and grey-blue cloth-covered bindings and big ridges under the cloth where they were fastened together, at least two feet high and six inches thick. Numbers in black were stamped into the spine. She found Book 18 easily enough; it was in the central cabinet right underneath her. Hauling it out she heaved it onto the chest-high cabinet. It consisted of huge pages of thick heavy paper with printed lines and blank spaces filled with—to her relief—a much neater and more flowing hand than had compiled the list. The paper was a stained yellow and the ink of the handwriting had faded to brown. It took her a while to puzzle out the ridiculously formal phrasing, but she eventually learned that in 1880 something I, Nisus Kinney '' of the town of ''Colebrook situate in Litchfield County, did for divers good causes received to my satisfaction of Herbert Culver, did (etc) make over to (him), A certain farm of land with dwelling house and other buildings, 125 acres big, bounded North by land of Martin Phelps and Solomon Sackett (interesting; she knew that name primarily from Lous L’amor Westerns), East by a highway, and finally West by land of (a scrawl of queer letters that might have been either Guy or Suey) Perkins. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” she muttered. Turning to the tier-map she noticed with disappointment it was from 1816. Looking at the dotted lines and comparing them with a large topographic map of Colebrook lying open nearby, she soon found a fairly large square just south of the Center marked Josiah Phelps. It probably had stayed in the family. The library’s other map of 1875 had, she remembered, indicated a Sackett dwelling south of the Center, though not near at all to the Phelps lot. But Phelps might well have sold part of it off. The roads going south from the Center formed a broad triangle…Old North Road came across it at such a point…the Phelps land seemed to cross it here…which would put the Phelps land right…there. She planted her finger on the topo map. The Culver place was south of Phelps land. East by a road…a road cut south from Old North Road at just that spot. West by land of Perkins… The terrain she had thus singled out was a nearly level stretch of upland, some mile or two across, rising to the northeast into the slow swell of Smith Hill and to the southwest in a sudden eminence labeled Panorama Hill, elevation 1450. If Culver’s land lay along this stretch, then “the hill above Burt Culver’s” must be Panorama Hill. “The Wild Man of Winsted was pointing north to Colebrook Center.” Travel realized. She checked the elevation of two or three low hills on the upland between Panorama, which was nearly due S of the Center, and Colebrook. None of the hills were higher than 1350. The view would thus be uninterrupted toward the Center. She ran her finger north. What was there in line with Colebrook? Not her house; that was off to the NW. The gorge of Center Brook, running north from the Center…unlabeled, nameless hills like small mountains, sudden gorges, and finally the Colebrook-Massachusetts line, where the map ended. Grandmother Lane was very interested in the results. She pulled out her own map and mused, running her finger north from Colebrook. “Do you know any legends or anything out that way?” said Travel. “No, and that’s odd…why north? …except maybe…Yes, they would be right in that area, though a little out of the direct line.” “What is it.” Grandmother Lane had a dim, foreboding look in her eyes. “The Lost Caves. He was pointing to the Lost Caves of Colebrook.” This winter was the snowiest one that Forest had ever experienced. Snowstorm after snowstorm blew down upon Winsted, amounting to about two a week. There had been a real blizzard, although Winsted only got 17 inches while the middle of the state, which usually never got anything, complained of 2½ feet. By the beginning of February the governor was begging everyone to shovel their roofs, and high time as the snow was mounting on some of them to over a yard thick. Forest didn’t go outside too often. Wading through snow over your knees is not much fun. He stayed inside, gazing dreamily out at the wonder of white, the roofs of the nearby houses as thick with snow as a cake with marshmallow frosting. Icicles hung like walls of teeth from every eave and gutter, giving the houses a quaint bearded expression. The bitter cold had gone away for a little, but the day after Groundhog Day Forest woke up early and found the thermometer at 4 below. He stared out the window in amazement. It looked like every tree was painted silver. He forgot about mundane things like school. Bundling up (and remembering important things like three shirts and a scarf) he slipped out the door. His big black rubber boots squeaked as he tromped out on the lake, along the path an errant snowmobile or two had considerately created. The hills, grey and blue above him on his right, were hiding the sun, and in the shadow the deep snow was a soft and faintest blue. He was right about the frost. On the left, off towards First Bay where the sun was now shining, a white mist lay in flat horizontal layers against the trees, thin and transparent; but the trees gleamed a dusky silver and white. Deep purple-silver were the trees in the shadows, and frosty gray were their boles. “I wanted you to see this, Forest.” He wasn’t at all surprised at the sudden appearance of his strange friend, even though the vast white flatness of ice had been empty before. Brown wore his fur cap today, but his scarf lay fastened around his throat instead of being pulled over his face like Forest’s was. His mittens were fur as well. “It’s…isn’t it.” Forest said, his face shining. He hadn’t found any words to fit how magnificent and beautiful it was, this stark glory of winter, but Brown knew all the images he had implied between those words and smiled, his stubbled face alight with an ancient, eternal, childlike sort of joy in the renewing beauty around him. They had gotten past Second Narrows and were heading across First Bay when the sun finally cleared Case Mtn and lit the entire lake before them, from faintest blue to dazzling, glittering white. Ten thousand crystals on the crusted surface caught the sun like mica flecks, like diamonds and slivered spangles of glass drifted with lavish abandon over old ridges and churned tracks of countless snowmobiles. Houses glowed white with frosting of snow and gleaming beards of icicle teeth, and the entire lake was girt with silver, hoarfrosted trees like a clumping mist of silver-grey on the west and blinding, lacelike silver-white underneath the sun. Every ridge was shadowed with blue, so that a web of fiery white and faint snow-blue covered the white plain before them. Forest drew in huge breaths, his heart and spirit laughing with the laughter of a giant, though he did not make a sound. “It is good to be upon the Long Lake when the sun rises on a winter frost.” said the man in brown. “The…what lake?” “Highland is a nickname, given by those who felt the old names were too plain and prosaic. And in the blunt speech of the English this is true, for the Long Lake and the Little Pond—Long, or even just Big, Pond it was often called by some of the dull-hearted earthmen that tilled its’ shores long ago—are names plain of sound and flat.” “I dunno.” said Forest. “I like Long Lake it feels— It has a mystery—“'' A sense of endless things unsaid,'' was what he was thinking. “In my tongue it is far more poetic.” said the Man in Brown. “Ando Lemenka it is in the Ancient Speech devised by the Guardians at the bottom of the world. It is fed, as you know, by the Sucking Brook that flows out of an even higher pond up Boyd St west of us, and that pond which men now call Crystal was once named (prosaically, they thought) Little Pond. But in my speech that is the '' Tinda Dillûra, Tindalo the Little One, which I loved. Smaller was it in those days, before the Boyd Street dam was built to raise it. They are special lakes, Forest.” They had by now traversed half of First Bay and were trudging over difficult snow where many tracks crossed. Forest had to give all his attention to his feet, but Brown saw the question in his mind and answered it. “Most of the lakes in New England—and they are many, Forest, they spangle the map like scattered jewels embedded—are unnatural; men made them, flooding ancient valleys and drowning many fair fields, such as the reservoirs across the ridges in Barkhamsted. But some few are natural, they were there before men, the last remains of the giant lakes that the Drowning left behind, most of which now form the great swamps and sand plains. And there a few, rarer still, that were not carved from the earth by the ancient ice but were there before it, old as the very hills in which they sit; and Long and Little are some of these.” They drew near to the boat launch on the northernmost shore of First Bay, now just a slope and half-buried ringwall rising out of the white plain. “What does Crystal Lake and Highland Lake sound like in your tongue?” The man in brown chuckled. “Not so beautiful. '' Aldoharn Lemenka for Highland, and '' Kintellas Lemenka '' for Crystal. The English names were given in English, and sound better in that tongue. For they are not the true names.” They climbed up the rough ramp, a few sad trees poking out of the piled snow, and crossed the parking lot. The shore road curved north, rounded the west side of this, then ended at a much older road named West Lake. This road runs east from Boyd Street above the lake, down across the dam, then over Pond Hill that walls in First Bay on the NE and so to it’s end near the piped-in spring. Down this road they walked in silence. Forest could not have spoken in any case; he was too lost in wonder. A few beautiful old houses perched on the high shore between the boat launch and the dam, icicles ten feet long bending slightly inward at the top, straightening the lower they got, hanging pendant from the many eaves. The road went over the top of the low dam, which had two broad spillways set a couple feet lower than the dam top, about 30 feet apart, giving cars a rolley ride. No water trickled across in winter; the underwater gates were open and water flowed in a millrace channel through the ruins of the Union Pin factory before returning to its’ age-old bed. A square patch of woods guarded the stream on its’ rocky descent into the Winsted valley, and the breath of the rapid water had condensed the frost more thickly here. The silver on every twig gleamed almost pure, a fine and intricate net of hoar-crusted trees that caught the sun. A soft strong blue was the clear sky. Snow thrown up to fantastic heights shut in the road like brown cliffs, higher than Forest. “Oh, look!” exclaimed Brown, pointing out to the lake. Forest forgot to walk. A sea of pearled white lay before him, and on the right where the last house stood, a small cape ran out from its’ yard, snow blown against it and layered upon it gleaming. Something, something about the way in which the sloped bank rose out of the plain, the sharp drifted edges above the near-buried seawall, the spread of the little white birch that rose lonely from the cape, bright against the grey-shadowed hill on the far side; something about the tufts of orange-yellow grass rising from the snow at the cape-tip; caught him like a vise and made heart and breath stop. It was like a sudden overlapping of another and brighter world, shining with an eternal ancient beauty on the pale shadow-things of Middle-earth. “The world is ending, Forest.” Brown murmered. “As the end draws upon it the veil grows transparent, and the glimpses caught of that unspoiled world are like spears of unutterable beauty, and then the hearts of those who see come nigh to breaking with the dearness of these passing things, these reflections of what it ought to be and will.” “I can’t bear it.” whispered Forest. Brown resumed walking again. “Yet bear it we must, and break as we will we have no choice in the matter, for this world so dear is a land of exile and in the end we are doomed to leave it. Tears unnumbered ye shall shed, and with the earth thou must wrestle to bring forth thy bread, in thy sweat shalt thou eat and few things will be sweet, for the herbs are grown bitter and thorns the earth yields to thee for thy toil; bound for thy food to the earth thou must till, till thou return to the dust from which thou wert taken.” They crossed the spillways and reached the roadmeet where Lake St climbs up from the valley, and turned down it, passing houses so ancient that repairs had effaced all sign of age. Just before the sharp steep curve in which Lake St makes its’ abrupt descent, a side street joins, and on the prow of the hill between this road and Lake St a house in the last stages of habitude before ruin still stood. Five giant spruce rose behind it. Siding and eaves showed the wavy sag of a sinking foundation. Bittersweet climbed on one side, choking several of the old windows, and misfit doors of incredible age struggled to repel the weather. Crazy screens tacked over some of the first-floor windows, and a beaten path to the plowed stub of a drive, betrayed human occupation: some embittered old man, perhaps, dwelling out his last days in the few rooms that remained liveable, shutting off the rest to slowly die. Ancient trucks and vehicles a hundred years old cluttered the narrow hill-brow, slowly buried under vines and trees, and up from the slope leaned a tottery shed already collapsing slowly into the hill. “This is not what I took you here to see.” Brown said, gently tugging Forest away from the fascination of that dilapidation. “Not yet. Let us walk further.” The road was narrow and wonderful, a mere lane between the walls of browny-white. The iron cold had turned the slush of its’ surface into a fine brownish snow, streaked in lines like an unflowing river ever halted. They were heading into the sun, and the silver hoar flamed white as they rounded a bend. Once again Forest halted, struck by beauty. Smoke from every chimney rose thin and white and fair, and icicles shone like swords, and the road ran on straight toward the sun, and the sky was utter blue, and the snow was fiery white, and the road was sandy brown, deep-cut between blue and brown and white walls, and fairy houses reached by dolven canyons squatted comfy, white and beautiful among the silver trees. “This is the true face of Winsted,” the voice of Brown rolled in the deep cold clearness of winter quiet. “This is what the world is really like, Forest. This is how things truly are, like fairy lands of wonder that dwell under enchantment, and the prosaic earthbound creatures that walk therein and do not see what they inhabit, they are beautiful too, ugly and odd and absurd and pretty all together, gnomes and elves in a magic world. Look on them and remember, Forest, remember what they are.” They walked down the enchanted lane of snow. Forest half expected to find it leading to some mysterious alternate world, and it rather looked it; the grainy brown streets like ancient wagon roads cut through white earth, the plain New England houses now fantastically frosted and bearing great spiky eyebrows of comb-toothed icicles, the transformation of everything drab and dull by the stern magic of the lords of winter. They took the crossing streets that bisect the southern slopes of the Winsted Valley, and then down a short steep overlooked by a strange white house with a round cone-topped tower budding out from one corner. Bridge Street was utterly different as well with flowing curves of brown slush where cars passed more frequently. This was one of Winsted’s more insane roadmeets: Bridge came straight down the hill to meet Main St, with Prospect intersecting it on the west and the short stub of street that had once served a rail station meeting it on the east, and then not thirty feet below another street came in, also on the east: Willow St. Consequently a driver desiring to pass from Prospect to Willow had to negotiate a weird S curve, down a hill. Brown snow mountains forced Forest and his companion to walk in the road. “I just remembered.” said Forest slowly. “Don’t I have, like, school today?” “This is far more important than school.” said the man in brown. “And in school they teach so little of what you should really know, and so much that is only nonsense at best, and poison at worst.” He stamped savagely upon an unoffending ridge of dryish pale brown slush. “Curse them, pen and mouse! It is because of them and the rubbish they pour into you that I must call so slow. It used to be that I needed but a month, and often less. And then came Darwin…and then came relativity…and outcome-based education with computer slideshows and student laptops….until so hard put am I to find one who will listen, that if the world grinds on past another Returning I doubt anyone will be left who can still hear me.” “Mom’s gonna worry.” said Forest. “Not ‘Teacher’ll be mad’ or ‘But I had sports today’ or ‘But I just '' hafta'' be around Katie Lyn!’ ” observed the man in brown. “Paramount with you is that your mother may worry. I already took care of that. Your mom overslept, and someone called you in sick.” “You mean I get to skip school?” said Forest, hardly believing it. “You get to skip '' public'' school.” Brown said severely. “Not mine. College library opens at 8:30, and daylight lasts till 5; there are things you have to know. Your father would have taught you them, but your father is not here, and it is left to me betimes to scramble to fill the gaps. Oh look! It’s almost time for daily Mass. Come with me to Mass, Forest.” “It’s—it’s Catholic.” said Forest, in the same wary tone he might have said, “It’s a gang bar.” “Understand this, Forest,” said the man in brown, “the Baptists and the Catholics are ultimately on the same side. It is altogether different with the Moslems, who are merely intolerant, and the many forms of nature-worship, occult and Wiccans, who are most decidedly enemies. I stand with the Catholics, as I have always stood, as in the end all who support the power of good will find themselves doing. In the last stand all who are not on the side of the Catholics will find themselves on the side of the Enemies.” They walked up to the church in silence. Deep snow made lawn and grounds impassable and shut off the high rock. Brown stopped and motioned to it. “That’s the edge of Church Hill.” “You told me there were Nine Hills.” “Yes,” said Brown as they mounted the broad steps, “two in the center, seven surrounding. We are on Church Hill, in the very middle of the circle. Then there’s Camp Hill, Pond Hill beneath the lake (we walked down it), Cobble Hill above the hospital, Spencer Hill behind Gilbert, Street Hill above North Main, Wallens Hill out by Regional High, Pratt Hill above the lake on the south-east, and Ward’s Hill at its’ feet just across from your place. But this has to be postponed, for a Fell Winter is upon us and no place off-road will be accessible before March.” He entered the church, blessing himself with holy water. Forest gave him a puzzled look: Baptists don’t use holy water. Patiently Brown told him that the sign of the cross was a form of prayer and not a superstition. “By touching first forehead, heart, left and right shoulders, we invoke the Holy Trinity and place ourselves under Their protection. Thus we say when we bless ourselves, ‘In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.” “It still seems kind of...” Like a magic sign, he thought. “The Catholics use no magic, Forest.” Brown whispered. There were only a few scattered people kneeling in the large church, and Brown had picked a pew as far away from others as he could. “The Catholics are magic’s opposite. Or you might say magic is the ape of Catholicism, crudely trying to duplicate the Church and mock Her.” “What is magic?” whispered Forest. “After Mass.” replied Brown as the priest entered and the congregation rose to begin worship. The green vestments were, though unusual, familiar to Forest; on special holydays the minister wore vestments, though he usually favored a cassock. Forest was rather surprised to find the ritual familiar as well, though it had some things in strange order like the Our Father, tacking the ending sentence as a response way off in another part (“For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever”). Scripture lessons were called “readings” and there was a Gospel (everyone stood, another oddity), a sermon that was surprisingly brief and, even more surprisingly, he agreed with it. Then the strange part began. Forest found the offering of gifts, the invocations and responses, fascinating. They reminded him of something, they were leading up to something he could not understand, but he understood the mystery of ritual and watched with wide eyes. He frowned a little when the priest blessed the gifts by tracing Crosses repeatedly over them—it did seem a little like magic symbols—but Brown whispered that by tracing a Cross above the bread and wine the priest was hallowing them by calling God to bless them. Forest watched intently as the priest bent over the bread and spoke aloud, “''…take this, all of you, and eat of it; for this is My Body, which will be given up for you.” He raised a small white wafer above the worshippers. Forest felt time halt and freeze. He was, after all, one of those who can see, and now he saw. White fire came from the white wafer. It was not blinding, only deep and pure and tremendous; reality, he felt, was contained within it, and It alone. Church and priest and altar, servers and congregants, became transparent as shadows. It was not bread. God had been called down onto that altar. He felt the hands of Brown lifting him up from where he had fainted. He felt dazed and weak, and his head hurt. “Did you see Him, Forest?” said the Man in Brown quietly. “I saw Reality.” said Forest. There was an inexpressible wonder in his voice. He noticed the other people were getting up and filing into the aisle, and realised this must be their communion service. “Yes, Forest.” said the man in brown. “The Catholics are given the very flesh and blood of Our Lord to consume. He looks like bread and wine…even tastes like it, I hear…” “How come you’re not receiving?” said Forest, observing Brown still kneeling beside him. “The Eucharist is not for me.” said Brown, and such unutterable longing was in his voice it went through Forest like a cold knife. There were tears in the strange blue eyes. “It was made for Men, and I may not partake so.” “I thought you were a Catholic.” Brown closed his eyes. “I stand with them, Forest, but I am not of them. Only Men can be of the church.” “Then what ''are you?” The face of the Man in Brown was set like stone. “I am venda.” Forest did not ask what that word meant. A strange fear had come over him at the very sound of it.